As the story goes , the chemical - filled Cuyahoga River in Cleveland collapse into flaming on June 22 , 1969 , perchance conflagrate by a glint from a pass train .
That hadhappened at least dozen times beforeon the Cuyahoga . Additional fervency were known to blaze upon river in Detroit , Baltimore , Buffalo , and other cities .
River fires were far from the only environmental tragedy in the US at the time . A spill from an seaward oil rig in California surface the coast in crude and pollutants . Smog and car exhaust - choked city around the land .
In the late sixty , Americans were growing more aware of how unregulated pollution and chemical usance were endangering the res publica and the masses in it . multitude were ready for a alteration .
In his 1970 State of the Union address , President Richard Nixon said : " We still consider of melody as free . But sportsmanlike air is not loose , and neither is clean body of water . The damage rag on defilement control is high . Through our twelvemonth of past carelessness we receive a debt to nature , and now that debt is being called . "
Nixon pursue that up with a list of requests to Congress and later that year annunciate the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency , or EPA .
Soon after it was founded , the EPAbegana photograph project calledDocumericathat catch more than 81,000 double evince what the US looked like from 1971 to 1977 .
More than 20,000 exposure were archive , and at least15,000 have been digitizedby the National Archives .
The EPA ’s role since then has varied from administration to governing .
Trump ’s former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt worked to stray back a identification number of rule that were previously put in piazza to protect air and water . Many reports suggestedPruitt ’s primary aim was to obviate most environmental protections and dismantle parts of the regulatory agency .
But on July 5 , in the wake of a long list of scandal , Trump announced he ’d accept Pruitt ’s surrender .
Pruitt had announced plan tokill the Clean Power Plan , the Obama government ’s principal first step to fight mood change by lowering emissions . Under Pruitt , the EPA alsoreversed a ban on a pesticidethat can harm small fry ’s brains and moved torescind the Clean Water Rule , which clarified the Clean Water Act to prohibit industry from dumping pollutants into streams and wetlands .
Andrew Wheeler , a former ember lobbyist , was Pruitt ’s surrogate and is now acting administrator of the EPA , so it ’s likely that he will act on a exchangeable agendum .
The resignation of Pruitt , along with the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy , raises Modern question about the hereafter of environmental regulations in the US . Kennedy , whoplans to finish his work on July 31 , was the swing vote in a phone number of environmental font , including the one that granted the EPA the power to regulate nursery gases under the Clean Air Act . A new Trump campaigner may be more probable to countermand primal environmental trade protection , according to legal expert .
As a reminder of what the US looked like before many of the EPA ’s policies were in place , here ’s a selection of the Documerica photo from the seventies .
David Shanklin , pictured here at age 19 , lived in a coal - company town near Sunbright , West Virginia . Shanklin ’s father was kill in the mines in 1954 , and though Shanklin wanted to become a mineworker , his female parent did n’t desire him to . Jack Corn / Documerica
Smog , seen here haze over the George Washington Bridge in New York , was a far bigger job .
Smog was common , as this shaft of Louisville and the Ohio River from 1972 shows .
Factories burn toss away automobile batteries in the 1970s , releasing pollutant into the atmosphere . Current regularisation require the batteries to be recycled without contaminating the surrounding region , though some are exported .
Mary Workman of Steubenville , Ohio , holds a jarful of undrinkable urine from her well in this photograph . She filed a lawsuit against a coal fellowship , accusing it of polluting her H2O . The EPA now uses the Clean Water Act to prevent companies from contaminating drinking water .
EPA functionary used briefcase - size of it monitors to test radiotherapy levels . This image shows them test the monitors in a Las Vegas lab before send them out to be used .
reservoir : EPA
ember - excavation companies were bigger defiler in the seventies as well . President Donald Trump has pledged an industry resurgence and recently nominated a coal lobbyist to be Pruitt ’s 2d - in - command at the EPA .
Pollution in industrial metropolis like Cleveland , Ohio , was particularly life-threatening .
This photo shows a burn barge on the Ohio River in May 1972 . A ardor on the Cuyahoga River in 1969 ( the thirteenth time that river had caught fire ) avail to inspire the creation of the EPA .
Los Angeles has long been known for its smogginess issues . Here in 1972 , it obscures the Lord’s Day above a railroad near the Salton Sea .
Auto pollution across the country was far worse before the Clean Air Act was used to baffle pollutant and fuel .
Without regularization , more companies and manufacturer would be able to dump pollutant into Ethel Waters and the air we breathe .
This Wiley Post was originally publish on October 9 , 2017 , and has been update .
